Upper West Side Guide

Manhattan’s Upper West Side offers visitors a chance to see how Manhattan lives. Lying between Central Park and the Hudson River above West 59th Street, as the Upper East Side, the UWS is an upscale, primarily residential, area, with many of its residents working in more commercial areas in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Traditionally, the UWS it has the reputation of being home to New York City’s cultural and artistic nobility, while the Upper East Side is almost always associated with the commercial and business elite.

The 66-block stretch of Broadway forms the spine of the neighborhood and runs diagonally, north-south across the avenues at the south end and parallel to the avenues above 72nd Street. The Upper West Side has also been a setting for many movies and television shows because of its pre-War architecture, colorful community and rich cultural life. Woody Allen’s film Hannah and Her Sisters captured the quintessential Upper West Side flavor of rambling high-ceilinged apartments bursting at the seams with books and other cultural artifacts.

Morningside Heights, just west of Harlem, is also the home to Columbia University and Barnard College, as well as a host of smaller schools who that brought about the eventual gentrification of the neighborhood. In a subsequent phase of urban renewal, the rail yards which had formed the Upper West Side’s southwest corner were replaced by the Riverside South residential project and a southward extension of Riverside Park. The neighborhood’s latest project and battle is Columbia University’s plan to build a new campus in the Manhattanville area of West Harlem. The school takes up most of the area from 110th to 125th, Amsterdam to West End Avenues.